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make your own diastatic malt

make your own diastatic malt

Make you own diastatic malt

You can make your own: sprout a cup of wheat berries by coveringthem with water in a jar for 12 or so hours, dump out the water &rinse with clean water, and place the jar in a darkish, warmish,place. Rinse the berries every day with clean water and return totheir place.

In 2-3 days they will begin to sprout. When the sprout is as long asthe berries themselves, dump them out on paper towels, dry them off,and set on a cookie sheet in the sun for a day or so to dry out. Thenput the cookiesheet in a 100F oven for an hour or three. Do not letthe temp get above 130F or the enzymes will be destroyed.

Then grind the dried malted berries into flour, and use it in yourfavorite recipe at a rate of approx. 1t. per loaf.

I am new to this blog but I also could not find any diastatic malt in AL, so I search the internet and happened to find a web site to make your own diastatic malt. I did not saved the web address but I did copy the recipe and I did follow the direction and make my own diastatic malt. I hope it will help some of you to make your own diatatic malt. I sprout 1/4 cup of wheat berry instead of 1 cup and grounded it and store in the freezer.

Comments

That's an interesting process for making your own diastatic malt. Re: sources, I know for sure King Arthur sells diastatic malt powder, I have purchased it from their on-line store along with French flour and gluen.

Yes, you can order it from KA, but I don't use diastatic malt in all my baking, only when the recipe asked for it. It will take me a long time to use up 1 lb. it make more sense for me to make a small amount to keep it fresh. I made 1/4 cup of wheat berry two months ago and I only used 2 tsp and still have plenty left for the future.

There are two kinds of malt, wheat and barley. The barley mostly for making beer and the wheat malt is I used for baking. I think you can use either one for baking. I think you can make barley malt following the recipe.

Hello all fellow bakers! After lurking around here for a few months I have a question for you. I wanted to make my own diastatic malt and have found a jar of what is either barley or what berries in my pantry. Yes, I know I should have lebelled it, but at the time I put it there I was NEVER going to forget what it was. Same thing used to apply to boxes of food in my freezer, but now I am the queen of masking tape and permanent markers and so that is no longer a problem.

So the question is, how do you tell the difference between the two grains? Will it matter which one it is when I finally get it to sprout then dry and grind it?

Mini, your 'naked barley' comment got me thinking. I was trying to work out why it would be called that and it was only when I got to making my own this week that I discovered why.

I searched far and wide for barley seed (never though that it would be that difficult to find) and eventually found some at a garden shop which had a health food section. There is plenty of roasted barley around (used to make barley tea) but that is no good as it definitely ain't going to sprout anymore.

I followed the method used in this video. (It is worth watching for the background music alone).

On day two, I bit a sprout open to test its tenderness. Inside it was soft and sweet but I was left with a woody husk in my mouth. It was then that it dawned upon me that you had bought 'hulled barley'. So I was left with the problem of how to remove the husks without wasting too much. I used a sieve as suggested in the video but that only removed the little rootlets. I had a fair amount of success rubbing the dried barley between my palms but I still had to separate the grain from the husk. I experimented with putting a small amount into a bowl with water. I was hoping the lighter husks would float and that the grain would sink but now that the grain had been dried, everything floated. In the end I ground everything up and passed it all through two sieves (first a coarse one and then a very fine one). It removed 90% + of the husk but it was rather laborious.

Does anyone have any better ideas.?

In the meantime I have found some hulled barley but the woman who sold it to me said that not all of it would sprout as quite a few of the grains had received mechanical damage in the hulling process. It will probably entail me picking over the whole lot and sorting out the good grain from the bad. It also doesn't resolve what I am going to do with the kilogram of whole barley seed I now have and don't want to waste.

It the meantime, it has taken me five days and for all that effort I only have 53g of diastatic malt. I am definitely going to give it another shot and will post again if I come up with any bright ideas.

One more question for anyone who is listening: Where should I keep my 53g stash of diastatic malt now that I have made it. I don't want it to go rancid after all that work. Should I keep it in the freezer? Or will that damage the enzymes? How about the fridge? Or in a dry place?

I also have 20g coarser malt flour in the kitchen and it is still good, but I'm not in the tropics like you are!

"It will probably entail me picking over the whole lot and sorting out the good grain from the bad."

--check out when I rolled the matts of roots over, the unrooted ones just fell out.

About those extra seeds, when you're done malting... Have you got some empty window boxes? Plant a pot or two with some grain, about one seed every 3 cm. You can also cook some whole grains in the rice cooker and then add it to your dough or eat or blend with rice or soups.

I've seen that video link... I've been there before! I didn't like the ceramic pots and preferred to rinse them again in trays to keep them fresh.

Update: found this on Wikipedia. Those of you who have been following this thread might be interested.

Hulless or "naked" barley (Hordeum vulgare L. var. nudum Hook. f.) is a form of domesticated barley with an easier to remove hull. Naked barley is an ancient food crop, but a new industry has developed around uses of selected hulless barley in order to increase the digestible energy of the grain, especially for swine and poultry.[11] Hulless barley has been investigated for several potential new applications as whole grain, and for its value-added products. These include bran and flour for multiple food applications.

A quote from that link: "Further, rye malts tend to be richer than barley malts in alpha amylase, although barley malts provide slightly higher diastatic power."

The naked barley is soaking up water now for 6 hours, I will drain and rinse it and let it rest in my colander overnight. Rinse again in the morning. Is it my imagination or does that one granule (middle, slightly lower from the center) in my picture look like another grain?

I read that too about drying the sprouts when as long as the berry. But I'm still looking around. On the above link the drawing is not so long as the body. Here are mine after 12 hours overnight (6 hour soak first) with just the beginning of a root.

From what I understand, the seeds put out rootlets, these are not what we want. We want the sprout that is growing inside the seed and the only way to check on the growth is to cut a germinating seed open and look inside. When the sprout inside is the length of the seed, then it is ready to dry. The rootlets are removed as their taste is not desired. It takes anywhere from 6 to 8 days.

It is important that the seeds stay moist by rinsing often and well aired, so not too packed together.

Drying is done low temperature. Grinding should also be done as cool as possible.

Ha! There is a better way! Today, Day 3, I observed that the outside of the seed is translucent and in this photo one can see the sprout extending up the side of the seed. Look at all those rootlets!

Now the question is: Stop when the sprout reaches the end of the seed or when it extends beyond the length of the seed the same length as the seed?

Stopped the growing. Rinsed and starting to dry using a fan. Some of the sprouts extend beyond the seed, same are the same length and some are like the photo above. Rootlets everywhere! I judge them to be ready to dry at 66 hours old, Day 4.

The water I rinse them with is slightly warmer than room temp. I placed them in sprout trays and put them into the oven on a rack. I removed the rack for rising placing everything over the sink. Then run water into the trays. They drain into the sink and when all the water has run off, they go back into the cold oven with the door shut. Worked well and they were out of the way. If I needed the oven, all I had to do was stack them.

The bulk doubled in size overnight each time. I layered the seeds about 1cm deep in the trays when they were 30 hours old. When I flipped them out this morning they were like round matts. So I laid them upside down on parchment -- roots in the air!

I did have them outside first but they started to green. So I've got them in a dark room over the oven rack and suspended that up off the table and parked a ventilator in front of it. The little rootlets are shriveling up. The seeds without roots are falling out of the matts. (Better than pigeons for sorting!) Interesting "green" smell. There is quite a few sprouts to dry. I started out with 500g and wishing I had made less.

That's what I would do if a recipe called for roasted malt. Roasting does make it non-diastatic.

I got enough of the stuff now. I froze the bulk of it because I wasn't sure it was completely dry. Been working on my ark lately with all this rain. I have 30g of malted barley left over from sifting that looks like semolina. If I have to roast any, it'll be the first to hit a hot fry pan. Sweet stuff so I'll have to watch and stir constantly while browning!

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